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Restaurateur and early adopter Nick Pappas, who owns Flamestone Grill in Oldsmar, was one… more

Nola Laleye

Tampa Bay’s technology community has been looking for a spark – a boost put it on the map. There are a dozen cities across the country trying for the same thing. We all want to be the next Silicon Valley.

The opportunity for a community to become the home of crypto-currency startups is out there.

Restaurateur and early adopter Nick Pappas, who owns Flamestone Grill in Oldsmar, was one… more

Nola Laleye

“Now is the time that all of the formidable companies in this space will be founded,” said Matt Branton, a crypto-currency entrepreneur whose Tampa-based company Coinlock is nearly two years old. Coinlock helps anyone sell digital content like ebooks and music with bitcoin anonymously.

Do Atlanta and California have a head start? Of course, but now Tampa Bay has the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl. That may not seem like much at first glance, but it gets our name out there.

The casual reader and the diehard fan will chuckle at how close we are to the end times because a bowl game is named after something they don’t understand.

On a deeper level, because of the efforts of Atlanta-based BitPay and its sponsorship of the bowl game Dec. 26, it’s St. Petersburg they will associate with this new technology – not Atlanta, not Austin, Texas, not Silicon Valley - if we have the right moves in our playbook. If we don’t we could be relegated to the bench for a while longer.

BitPay is one of a handful of bitcoin payment service providers that have emerged during the past few years as people around the world have begun to experiment with the crypto-currency. It agreed to sponsor the Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl for three years at an undisclosed amount. Its goal: to put bitcoin’s name on the bowl’s brand to help boost recognition of the technology.

It comes at the precipice of what could be the next huge thing in global financial markets. Even if bitcoin is not the crypto-currency that changes the world’s financial systems, it costs nothing to welcome and support the entrepreneurs trying to make it happen.

The opportunity of having the name bitcoin associated with St. Petersburg for the next three Decembers is one we can seize or one we can ignore, but we can’t complain that we don’t ever get lucky.

This is the moment.

“It is a giant opportunity, we just need to grab it,” Branton said of the recognition that will come to St. Petersburg because of the Bitcoin Bowl. “That’s the whole point of the Bitcoin Bowl, to raise awareness and build more opportunity. I hope they are successful.”

“There will be 20 years worth of startup companies that will be able to grow from this technology,” said BitPay CEO Stephen Pair.

“This helps St. Pete in a wonderful way,” said St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Chris Steinocher. “We want people to look at us differently, too.”